AS PAUL Martin prepares to attend the G8 Summit in Scotland, a simple question must be asked: Does Liberal Canada’s foreign policy mean anything any longer to its people and the world?
The question is pertinent given the overwhelming objective reality that in the past 50 years—a sufficient length of time to measure a country’s progress or lack thereof—contemporary Canada’s presence in world affairs has shrivelled and shrunk.
Fifty years ago, as the “wind of change”—in the memorable phrase of Britain’s then-PM Harold MacMillan—was blowing through colonial Africa, Canada stood modestly as a beacon of enlightened leadership on the world stage.
Canada’s voice was heard in the corridors of power in all continents and, where it mattered most, among its allies with whom Canadians sacrificed blood and money for freedom and democracy in Europe and Asia.
Lester Pearson was not simply a Liberal Secretary of State for External Affairs, he was the face of Canadian activism at home and abroad. He belonged to the generation that had seen its finest mowed down by enemy fire, and he understood from experience that keeping peace required a country to be strong and ready to support those professionally dedicated to that purpose.
He also understood peace could not be sustained or spread if large parts of the global population were deprived of their basic humanity through poor governance, decades of misrule or oppression, and lack of trained personnel in the requirements of building modern economies.
From the early, shaky and at times quarrelsome beginnings of Canadian commitment to helping developing countries, begun with Pearson’s role in the Colombo conference of 1950 to his 1968 report Partners in Development—sponsored by the World Bank, in which developed nations were urged to devote 1% of GNP for progress of developing nations—Canada’s voice in world affairs was sought and heeded, if not fully adopted.
But Canada was also a clear-headed nation taking its responsibility for national security and global peace seriously, and a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization directed against massed armies of the former Soviet Union and its communist satellites in divided Europe.
Under Conservative PM John Diefenbaker, Canada remained boldly engaged in the world as it took the lead in expelling racist South Africa from the Commonwealth of Nations. Decades later another Tory, Brian Mulroney, aided in bringing an end to the white minority South African regime.
FRIENDSHIP ABOVE RANCOUR
Canadian leadership understood, despite party differences, that support for democracies must remain unblemished by support for economic and social progress of developing countries. Moreover, Canada’s weight in the world was also reflective of its firm friendship above partisan rancour with the U.S.
But beginning in the 1970s, the Trudeau years, followed by his protege Jean Chretien’s now increasingly questionable rule in the 1990s, boutique-left Liberal light-headedness incrementally transformed Canada’s record from punching above its weight into offering flim-flam rhetorical flourishes while mooring the country’s foreign policy into a swamp of confounded national interest.
Embracing Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, as a friend might have seemed chic and symbolic of Canadian self-assertiveness, but such grandstanding came with a cost.
The cost is eloquently described by Andrew Cohen in his 2003 book While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (McClelland & Stewart). It should be a mandatory reading for any thoughtful Canadian concerned about where, if anywhere, the country is headed.
Cohen describes how Canada became a Potemkin country, where appearance and reality are at odds.
When Bangladesh sends more peacekeepers than Canada, and Holland meets Pearson’s target in providing developmental assistance—just two indicators in a long list of retrenchment—then Canada’s presence in the G8 may rightly be questioned by others around the world.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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